


which bounteous nature hath in him closed

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-29
Updated: 2011-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-28 10:20:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/306862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's going to be a long three years. To help while the time away, Terezi makes Karkat a present, of a kind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Karkat's face smells like a bruise, all over shadowy and greencast. The sun's wild light has chased you a long way into the dark, its brilliance drifting ghostly over one side of the asteroid. It gives an impression of afterimages where none exist, eddying sourly around solid silhouettes.

"What do you want?" he says. You can smell the minute movement of blood in his iris. You are most sensitive to red. Humans are like that, Rose says. Red arrests the human eye, Rose says. You imagine arresting her eyes, but it doesn't seem to be a daydream that belongs to you-- more like a vestige, your past self's last bequest, to borrow a Karkatian conceit.

The t in Karkatian is soft like _shhh_ : like the edges of Karkat's dark mouth. Karkat never really understood that the purpose of past selves is to die. He has never really understood that it could be anyone's purpose to die, even his own crotchety ghost. 

Mustard energy still crackles at the outer limit of the meteor's atmosphere, a yellow boundary on the dark.

It is just barely possible that you never understood it either.

"Terezi," says Karkat. You've been silent. You do that, these days. It seems to happen without your willing it, as if spaces are forming in your perception of time. Little holes. It turns out you are no good at waiting; none at all.

"I have a gift for you," you tell him. You remove it from your sylladex with a long, long scratch. A wet sniff. 

"You," Karkat starts, and stops. He looks at it. You look at him. In your hands the gift hangs long, the weight of the material pulling it into a narrow loop like a slitted eye. It was not designed to dangle.

Karkat, by contrast, smells like the soul of precipitation.

"Terezi," he says, low and urgent, "you presumptuous slice of shit,  _what the fuck is this--"_

"It's a collar," you say.

Karkat makes an aborted gesture, like his skin is shrinking; like he's trying to keep from spilling out of the holes. 

"It's so that you won't wander off," you say. "Or get lost."

You hold it out.

He stops. He turns away. He turns back.

"That makes no sense," he says. 

His shirtfront is damp under your fingers; he's been crying into it, again, the soaking pink singing against your palm. You will tell Kanaya to give Gamzee handkerchiefs. You draw him toward you, and he comes stumbling after. At no point does he struggle.

You breathe the floating map of his expression, his rage some far-off country laid out in delicate and symbolic notation under your open nose; his open mouth a metaphor for mountain ranges, his neck like uncharted water.

 _There be dragons,_ you think, and hold the collar to the column of his throat. Softly. A legislacerator-- _you_ are no physicist; you must observe without altering the particle observed.

"Yes," you say. "It does."

Karkat Vantas is angry, and dust is dust. But he trembles in your grip, and he smells hunted; and he smells hungry. You lift his weight off his feet and on his toes he arches, twists, the line of him seeking a point of contact like the arc of a blade.

"I'm no one's fucking barkbeast--"

You kiss the crest of his brow. You kiss his temple, where the vein runs shallow. You kiss his hair, his ear, and whisper, "There are sometimes benefits to being a hound, Mr. Vantas! _I'd know._ "

You breathe deep as a wound. 

"...That's not what I meant," he says, slowly, all boyshaped ache and tautening spine. You are tired, and he is heavy. You want to see the collar nestle at the base of his throat, casting sharp shade along his collarbones. You even want to think that he will follow you into darkness, and in darkness learn your scent. 

You're going to die, and someone smarter will have your name after you. You let him down. 

The look he gives you smells like a memory of fire. 

"Put it on," he orders. 

For a long minute, you do nothing. You don't breathe in or out. The world smudges, momentarily, to grey.

When you inhale it comes in an acidic rush, your mouth burnt through with color.

"Of course, dear leader," you say.

It goes on easily, the buckle closing without a sound; you alchemized it from one of Rose Lalonde's interminable scarves and Dave Strider's inexplicable belts, and it bends to fit the curve of Karkat's skinny neck. It looks like the band of empty sky that separated your two planets, in the Medium. It runs clean and dark across the junction of shoulder and throat. When you are satisfied that you have judged the number of holes to leave slack correctly, and tucked the tongue into its strap, you rest your hands on the hot sloping sides of his chitinous windpipe, and feel the awful thrumming of his pulse.

"Thanks," says Karkat. His eyes are closed. His lashes shine a greening black, like a crow's smile.

"Yes," you say, and lift your hands away, and take a long step back.


	2. Chapter 2

For three days life proceeds as normal. It's a little bewildering: how in three days nothing can happen except interminable hours. In a day your friends tore themselves apart and now you drift in shreds. Karkat, to your surprise, talks to you more, now, his hands sometimes skimming up towards the place where the collar sits, though they don't reach their destination while you're in the same room. He seems-- more like himself, indefinably young, the flat shine of his pubescence-hardened skin dulled to the softer grain of memory. You knew he would. It is still strange to see. Did he keep himself on so tight a leash, in those days? Does he know how to be a wriggler and unbound? You think he's happy. You think this might be the first time you've made him happy since you held him down and dug for the scent of blood under his skin.

You begin to avoid him. You know what's best for him, and that is neither fair nor just. You don't think about his ribcage, tucked between your knees, or the rasp of his wrist twisting in your grip. You don't imagine how his eyes would shutter and his breath would come in hot bursts, first, and then slow, like the resigned push of a sleeping animal's bloodsac. You have seen other people's paradises before, and usually, when you did, they broke.

And then

he comes to you.

He finds you deep in the laboratories beneath the surface, in a room scattered with broken glass. The shards lie thickly as a forest's moonlit undergrowth, all green shadows and intersecting mint gleams.

He picks his way to you.

"So is this where you go off too when you decide the rest of us are too liver-curdlingly stupid for your pre-eminent company?" he says, all weary snap. "When even the Cherry Fucking Delight of Time himself can't entertain?"

It occurs to you that you are tired of his bullshit! You are tired of the transparency of his need. 

So you ask.

"What do you need, Karkat?"

You turn around. The smell of him is only slightly clarified. His eyes are very dark. He was not expecting that; his hand goes up, as if instinctively, and he runs his thumb along the inside of his collar.

That surprises you, too.

The tip of his thumb appears, and disappears, the nub of it attractive. In this moment you regret giving him as much slack as you did.

"You fucking put a collar on me," he says, at last. "An honest-to-god lusus surrogate style leash. You could have the, the _decency_ to act like it."

Your breath hitches. You don't care. "Is that what this is about, Mr. Pity Sleuth? Decency?"

"Please," he says.

Your breath is never coming unhitched. It is caught on a hundred hooks, and separating.

You begin to circle him. Glass crackles underfoot.

"A collar does not necessarily imply subservience!" you tell him. "The connotations of such an article are manifold and complex."

"Please," he says.

You pretend not to have heard him. "It is, foremost, an affirmation of connection! A symbol of tethering, from satellite to center."

He is turning, slowly, like he's being dragged by your voice.

"It does not create duties where they did not already exist--"

With no bloody shred of grace, Karkat Vantas drops to his knees. 

"Please," he says.

He is not looking at you. His knees are beginning already to ooze, where glass sliced denim, then meat. His hair has fallen forward over his eyes in a downy tumble, curls catching on the bone of his brow. 

You have given so many gifts, all of them perfect. You have never, ever been asked.

You say, "Okay." Your hand moves to cup his jaw. You get down on your knees, to meet him.


End file.
